Saturday 26 February 2011

My Design Process

I recently designed and created a custom scarf for a friend of my sister's and as I had documented the work throughout, I thought I would provide a little insight on my design process for it.

initial sketch
First of all, I needed to work out a pattern, based on what she had requested. This involved lots of looking at pattern libraries for inspriation as well as scribbling and sketching on squared paper. This is generally how I plan out any design before I hand or machine knit one stitch.

punchcard
Once the pattern was worked out and agreed on, as this scarf was going to be made on my Knitmaster (a vintage mechanical - that's hand-operated to you and I - knitting machine), I needed to create a punch card with the pattern 'punched out.' This means I can easily make my own original designs for fair isle or individual motifs.

full knitted & felted swatch
Next, I whizzed up a swatch to test out my pattern design on my machine using Merino lambswool yarn and felted the test swatch to see how it looks in the chosen colours.

finished scarf design
Once this had been approved, I got started on the final scarf. After felting and trimming of floats/tufts on the reverse, blocking and sewing on my little WildCat Designs label, it was ready to go!

finished kitty + hearts scarf

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a beautiful scarf! Your design notebook looks a lot like mine: graph paper with eraser marks and smudges everywhere. :) I like that, I think it shows off the whole thought process. Great work!

Angie Chan said...

Oh how lovely to see behind the scenes! The weather here has suddenly turned all cold again - just perfect now that I have my kitty scarf :)